Strange Sentinels

I woke up this morning thinking about when this whole thing might have started, the disgruntled shtick. Babies cry when they get the urge to cry; usually, people don't question them. They answer.

At what point does a human, baby or otherwise, lose its credibility? Yes, I intentionally said it. Maybe the answer depends on how much learning has taken place in that person's life. The baby might have learned that crying gets him somewhere. He's going to milk that for all it's worth.

We all know about the boy who cried wolf. He lost his credibility when people realized he was full of false alarm.

Media sources need to be trustworthy in order for people to keep coming back to them. And I'd better say something to you that makes your visit to this blog worthwhile, too.

Credibility and trust are issues people like to lecture about. Stern parents warn their children about the consequences of being untrustworthy. Children listen and do what they were going to do anyway. Sometimes, the best we can hope for is that we can trust people to be themselves. This doesn't mean we escape trouble, of course. Just that we accept whatever a person does as we might accept, for example, a baby crying. Babies know nothing of missed opportunities. The only disappointment a baby really knows is that of discomfort. And who really can know and understand an adult's discomfort?

We have a cat who lives in a designated area. (Yes, that's him up above.) Even though he "knows" going beyond a particular door is off limits, he still stands there every day, crying. All it usually takes to calm him down is calling him over, petting him a little, and talking to him in a soothing voice. But he gets the urge to go to that door, again and again. He is very trustworthy this way; I would be surprised if he suddenly stopped crying at that door.

So, what kind of credibility do I have in this cat's eyes? He knows I'm the spoilsport who keeps shooing him away from there. Just as the cat can't (and won't) stop the urge to go beyond his boundaries, people are the same way. We'll push and push sometimes, until we either get "our way" or some kind of response: agreement, disagreement, or maybe just acknowledgement.

And yet why do we do this? Is it not enough to just be content, not strive for anything? No. We always want and need something. To be heard, or fed, or burped, or to move around outside the cabin, where it's not so feverish. And satisfaction is always temporary, too. The end of something means the beginning of something else. We might stop being disgruntled over the cat's behavior but then immediately pick up some new annoyance, a thing to complain about. So we scratch that itch and go on to the next thing. It literally never ends! We go to bed at night, needing that bed as much as we need to get out of it the next morning. And there's that cat again, waiting at the door to be scolded again, deterred from getting what he thinks he wants.

Maybe we are just gatekeepers, strange sentinels who grant and deny permission for this and that. And we're always expected to end on a happy note. What's that all about, anyway. We greet each other with smiles, hugs, and kisses. We leave each other in the same way. I am not advocating violent hellos or door-slamming exits. Maybe I'm just saying shaking up the routine could be useful.

Trust me, okay?